Dan II: A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age "Mycenaean" Tomb.

• Author: Hallote, Rachel
• Position: Book Review

Dan II: A Chronicle of the Excavations and the Late Bronze Age "Mycenaean" Tomb. By AVRAHAM BIRAN and RACHEL BEN-DOV. Annual of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology. Jerusalem: HEBREW UNION COLLEGE-JEWISH INSTITUTE OF RELIGION, 2002. Pp. vi + 249, illus.

This volume, the second part of the final report for the Tel Dan excavations, is intended to be used in conjunction with Dan I, which was published in 1996. The volume includes all the material excavated between 1993 and 1999 at Tel Dan. Its second half is a full report on the "Mycenaean Tomb" discovered in 1969. The general editor is Avraham Biran of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Biran has been the director of the Tel Dan excavations since their inception.

The Tel Dan project began in 1966, and continued through 1999. After the spectacular find of the "btdwd" inscription in the gate area (area A) of Tel Dan in 1992, the excavation team, which had planned to wind down the excavations after nearly thirty years in the field, went back to reinvestigate the area where the inscription was found. Although the strategy is not clearly stated anywhere in the text, the choice of excavation areas subsequent to 1992 suggests that the motivation for further excavation was the hope of finding additional inscriptions (one more was indeed found). Area A (the tablet area) was excavated in all subsequent seasons, area AB (just within and west of the area A gate) in just three, area K (an eastern gate area) in another four, and area T3 (outside the northwestern ramparts) in just one.

Curiously, the authors only refer to the inscription once in passing (p. 6), but present a photo of it on p. 11. An extensive literature on the inscription already exists in journals, and one assumes that a final report will appear in a later volume.

The presentation of the material lends itself to certain questions. First, a biblical orientation is discernible throughout the volume, and while this might be justified by the fact that Dan is a significant city in the Old Testament, the text of Dan II seldom discusses these biblical references in context. For instance, pp. 15-20 include a lengthy discussion of a structure termed the "hussot," found in area A in 1997. Biran points out the scriptural reference of 1 Kings 20:34 (which refers to the hussot of Damascus), and previously published articles by Biran cite other biblical references as well. But, while he briefly mentions that the term...